Fitbit will soon be putting out a full-featured smartwatch alongside a pair of Bluetooth earbuds, and photos of both devices have been leaked. Yahoo Finance did not identify their source, but managed to obtain one photograph of each of the upcoming devices. Along with photos, they managed to get their hands on detailed specs for the devices, including pricing information. They were also given some background information about the design and production cycle of the smartwatch, which means that their source is most likely a Fitbit employee. The smartwatch is set to cost $300, while the Bluetooth earbuds are set to cost $150. Yahoo Finance did not manage to obtain release dates for either item.
The smartwatch, codenamed Higgs, will apparently be the first full-featured smartwatch not focused on fitness, unlike Fitbit’s Blaze and Surge. Higgs will feature on board GPS, the ability to make payments, a heart rate monitor, a direct link to music service Pandora, and a whopping four days of battery life. This will all be happening underneath a color display with 1,000 nits of brightness. The aluminum body can hook into interchangeable bands. The headphones, known as Parkside, will come in Nightfall Blue, as pictured here, and Lunar Gray. The design of Parkside is reportedly fairly typical for neckband earbuds, but as seen in the attached photo, they feature a wide, unorthodox body design, and in-ear molding for a better fit and improved noise cancellation. Further information on the headphones’ specs, such as driver size and battery life, was unavailable.
This report did not detail whether Higgs was made in conjunction with Pebble, who Fitbit bought not long ago. Also absent was information on the OS; a spin on Pebble’s own OS is entirely feasible, and the long battery life, given the design, means that Android Wear 2.0 is quite unlikely, unless there have been some real concessions made on the hardware end. The processor, RAM, storage, and screen resolution were not revealed, and there was no word on the presence of Wi-Fi or cellular connectivity. The watch apparently went through a hectic design and production cycle; it reportedly wound up back on the drawing board multiple times between employee complaints and function issues, including a misplaced GPS antenna keeping the feature from working on the penultimate prototype of the upcoming watch. Waterproofing was also an issue in early designs, and on the software side of things, Spotify was reportedly tossed around as a possible streaming music partner before settling on Pandora.